This thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=14184090&posted=1#post14184090 about the oldest extant family in the world, reminds me of a story I read in an anthology or collection in the 1970s; a fellow invents a device (possibly a time-viewer) and sells his services as a “famous ancestor” finder - if you hire him, he’ll tell you who your most famous ancestor was (Charlemagne, Moses, Confucius, whoever). The catch is that he himself has no remarkable ancestors at all - even when he goes back far enough to find out who discovered fire or the wheel This is not Damon Knight’s “I See You” where ancestor research is a tangential benefit of a time viewer, but not the main application, nor is it Asimov’s “The Dead Past”.
I don’t know if it’s the one you want, but there was a story with more or less that plot in the British comic 2000 AD. It was actually a customer with no famous ancestors. But they eventually pushed the view back to the very dawn of civilization. The very first time a hominid picked up a heavy stick and used it as a club, that was this guys ancestor … getting his brains beaten out. Yup, his notable ancestor was the first ever murder victim.
The story definitely sounds familiar, but I can’t recall enough additional information about the story to identify it. If I’m remembering the story correctly, it was told as a conversation between the inventor and someone else (possibly a client or a reporter?) with the inventor revealing the information in your spoiler at the end.
Peter - that sounds very close, leading me to suspect that the comic was adapted from the short story - but I haven’t found any evidence of that yet. Thanks.
“Thatcher Blitt made a fortune with Geneology, Inc. He was able to trace everyone back through time so they could discover where they came from, famous ancestors and all. Now in his eighties, Blitt decides to trace his line back. He does have a distinction.”
I finally got the book through Interlibrary loan - “Galaxy Reader 4” edited by Horace Gold, and I’m delighted, because this is definitely the book I spent happy afternoons reading when I was 13 or 14 in the library in my old hometown in northern NJ, because it contains other stories that I remembered, though too vaguely ever to try searching for.